Know-How Exchange : Other

Hi Belinda

As a supplier to the mining industry, you benefit from having a well defined “Target Universe” to which to promote your goods and services. With the exception of businesses which can benefit from your company’s skills and technology in a peripheral sense (Perhaps a valid subject for a later exercise into diversifying your market base) all of your clients and potential clients will dig holes in the ground (OK, or do drift mining or quarrying).

This will enable you, through market research in industry journals, directories, on line resources and commercially available lists to develop a database of every single company, worldwide, which has the potential to use your equipment and technology. The basis for assembling this information must be a decent CRM software package (Customer Relationship Management) where the C is temporarily replaced with P, for Prospective Customer. We use Maximizer Enterprise.

The exercise is market research with a hard sales edge, because as well as discovering some useful marketing statistics, you will uncover almost every company in the geographical areas you sell into (Globally, I guess in mining) which has the potential to use your products, should you be able to persuade them to do so.

This is appealing to management, because the expenditure involved tells them not only some vital information on where they are in the market but at the same time allows them to direct their sales and marketing efforts into those operators who are not yet your customers.

I did a similar exercise for an American manufacturer of industrial process equipment in Europe, The Middle East and Africa. When I was hired I was reliably informed that they had 68% of the UK market and close on that for the rest of Europe. I didn’t believe the figures otherwise I wouldn’t have been so keen on the job! Here’s a summary of what I did, which you may be able to translate from the Chemical and Pharmaceutical industries into the Mining sector:

1. Using all resources available (Lists, directories, industry journals etc) I built up a comprehensive listing of all manufacturing companies in these sectors. It took about 3 weeks to compile.

2. I transferred the details – Company, addresses (All sites for each company) telephone and fax numbers, website addresses and details such as the products they manufactured – onto a CRM system so that the information could both be developed in value and shared around every department in the company, the regional offices and the salesmen who worked from home.

3. Then I got a competent telemarketing agency to identify the engineers, process technicians and buyers on site who were responsible for purchasing our type of products. This information was used to populate the CRM system with contacts, more phone numbers, email addresses and notes arising from conversations that took place.

4. Next, I got some more technically inclined members of staff to phone these contacts and to ask them what kind of equipment they used. (Including our own equipment – I didn’t exclude our existing customers because I wanted to find out if the decision makers were even aware that we were a supplier.)

We had an answer ready to give to customers who were baffled at being asked this type of question on the rare occasions when they were only too well aware that they spent $1,000,000 with us every year!

The questions were well received, technician talked to technician and an informal list of questions established who the competition was on site, what issues were important, if the company was a customer, were they aware of the fact (No, they weren’t, usually! Stores bought the spares and the chief had no idea who supplied them.)

Again, the answers to these questions and relevant notes were entered onto the CRM system. This took about 2 months.

5. Then we analysed the results. The 68% market share turned out to be 30%. Only 45% of our customers were even aware that we were their supplier at the level where new projects were approved. 70% of the contacts were in some way dissatisfied with their existing supplier. And so on.

6. Armed with this information, the sales teams conducted a two pronged attack.

They arranged to visit all of the existing accounts and talk to the people who ran the places, not the fellow who gave them an order every few months.

After the marketing team had written an introductory letter to the executives in the companies which did not use our product, the sales team arranged to make a brief introductory visit – not to sell anything, but to gain information in case we could be of service in a future project or in the event of an emergency.

All the visits were arranged on the CRM system and all the results noted, with further actions timed and set in peoples diaries, delegated to a more appropriate individual if necessary

7. I devised an emergency product replacement service which would sort out a crisis on a customer’s site (Or even a competitor’s customer’s site) in 24 hours and publicised it widely through direct mail and via the sales-force.

We avoided advertising or PR In order not to tip off the competition to our strategy. All of this was done via the CRM system. The sales people followed this through to explain the benefits of the emergency service and why the considerable cost of using it was worthwhile.


At the end of the exercise, we knew where we stood in every market in Europe, we were chastened to learn that our market share was less than we had thought, but buoyed up by the fact that we could do something about it.

The prospective customers were pretty keen too. In a recession in the market, the UK sales turnover rose 42%, the emergency service added a couple of Million to our bottom line and everyone got a humongous bonus.

The £14,000 we spent on the CRM system paid for itself when the first salesman made his first call to a competitor’s customer, sorted out a long standing problem and got a sizeable order on the spot – almost unheard of in our industry.

I hope that you can find some synergies in your own industry where this approach might be useful. If your senior management can’t see the value in that, either my ideas don’t translate into mining or you need to seriously re-educate the bosses!

Best Wishes

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions